Walker's last three novels share a number of characters. Shug, Celie, Nettie, Olivia, Adam, and Tashi from The Color Purple appear briefly in The Temple of My Familiar. Olivia, Adam, and Tashi are central characters in Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992). Fanny, who only appears in The Temple of My Familiar is the daughter of Olivia and the granddaughter of Celie. Walker has said that the novels are not intended to be seen as sequels, and indeed no character who has a major role in one book has anything but a minor one in the others. The characters reappear because as Walker said, she had a hard time leaving some of them or in the case of Tashi she did not have the space at the time to tell her story.